updated 07:07 am EDT, Fri August 10, 2012

Samsung Exynos 5 Dual with ARM Cortex A-15 enroute

Samsung has published a white paper (pdf) outlining the technical details and product highlights of its next-generation mobile processor. The new Exynos 5 Dualseries of mobile processors will be clocked at 1.7GHz and have been manufactured on Samsung's 32nm process using its High-K Metal Gate method. Underpinning the design is ARM's Cortex A-15 architecture, which will pit Samsung's latest chip directly against Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 'Krait' processors.

The Eynos 5 Dual will support WQXGA resolutions at 2560x1600 pixels, which also happens to be the rumored resolution of a forthcoming Samsung 11.8-inch tablet dubbed the P10 unearthed during its current court case with Apple. It supports high-bandwidth LPDDR3 RAM clocked at up to 800MHz with a throughput of 12.8GB/s, while it also offers native support for USB 3.0 and SATA III. It integrates an ARM designed quad-core Mali-T604 GPU that supports OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL 1.1 and DirectX 11. This will allow it to decode 1080p video at 60fps as well as support stereoscopic 3D.

As with the Snapdragon S4 dual-core processors, even in its dual-core configuration, the adoption of post Cortex A9 architecture offers substantial performance gains, even over Cortex A9 quad-core processors. However, the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual will significantly outgun the graphics performance of the current S4 dual-core processors that incorporate the Adreno 225 GPU. Samsung has not yet indicated which devices are set to adopt its latest design.